Wilhelm Meise

Wilhelm Meise (12 September 1901 in Essen – 24 August 2002 in Hamburg) was a German ornithologist. He studied at the University of Berlin from 1924 to 1928, where he did his Ph.D. dissertation on the distribution of the carrion crow and the hooded crow, and hybridization between them under the supervision of Professor Erwin Stresemann, (1889–1972). He spent three years in a prison camp in Siberia after the war, and joined the Berlin's Natural History Museum in 1948. In 1951, he was appointed curator of ornithology at the Museum of Natural History in Hamburg and professor at the University of Hamburg. The work consists of 3666 pages and presents in detail all species and subspecies whose eggs are known. According to Meise, there are 30000 - 35000 sub-species of birds, and the eggs of only half of these are known to science.

Meise's 170 publications dealt mainly with birds, but occasionally with the taxonomy of scorpions, spiders, lizards, snakes, and molluscs. He retired in 1972, and died aged 100 in 2002.